ACT YOUR AGE
With Age of Empires II still held up as a paragon of strategy games, you can see why new series developer Relic has decided to model Age of Empires IV on the second entry. The latest iteration strips away the complexities of AoE III, while adding welcome touches of its own. Chief among these are asymmetrical factions, which will elicit screams of bloody imbalance, but count as the game’s greatest success.
On the other hand, reverence to the past can be restricting, and I can’t help but feel that Age of Empires IV could have been something more. While I respect Relic’s decision to play things fairly safe, that should result in making what’s already there really shine; polish those mosque minarets and Moscavian onion domes, pump up those population limits, let bodies fly with abandon upon impact from cannonballs and elephant heads.
Instead, there’s a staid utilitarianism throughout—everything in it works much as it ever did, but without the flair that could have made it a grand celebration of that timeless formula.
